Did you ever wonder where your avocado and quinoa come from? Quite possibly from small-holder farmers in the Peruvian Andes. Although these delicious foods eventually make it to your store’s shelves in the US, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Americas, producing, harvesting and exporting them is getting more complicated all the time due to the effects of climate change.

An innovative financing mechanism, known as Social Impact Incentives or SIINC, has begun to take form and test its first experiences in Latin America, through the collaboration between the MIF, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the German firm “Roots of Impact”. SIINCs are financial incentives paid to emerging, high-impact social enterprises for reaching selected results and impact goals that are negotiated between the social enterprise and the outcome payer (in this case, MIF). The payments allow the company to improve revenues and profitability – and thus attractiveness to other impact investors – in exchange for achieving social impact, measured and verified by an independent evaluator.

In December 2010, I first made contact with Dr. David Gaus, who had recently been named “Regional Social Entrepreneur of the Year for Latin America” by the Schwab Foundation. As founder of the sister NGOs Andean Health & Development (AHD) in the USA and SALUDESA in Ecuador, Dr. Gaus received this award for his pioneering work in bringing quality health care to rural and vulnerable populations and training family doctors through a hospital in the remote town of Pedro Vicente Maldonado. Despite already having one sustainable rural hospital, he planned to construct a second hospital to expand health services to other underserved areas of the country, and we at the MIF were in a position to provide additional funding to complement the donations that he had secured.